And when you're already planning to take three years to come up with a business model, FOR GODS SAKE drop the whole thing and do something useful with your time and other peoples money.
However, Scribd is just another company leveraging the internet delivering a service to their customers. Nothing great and nothing fancy going on there and if the idea would indeed be worth the effort, they should have no problem starting of profitable or getting it profitable within the first year of operation.
You mean like Amazon, or eBay, or Google?
None of those companies make much of anything either.
Good point on responsiveness, my experience is that even pain-in-the-ass customers are important. Sometimes they're the most important ones over the long haul. But you're still a pain in the ass ;-)
However, I know first hand that some companies definitely should not have raised capital, and were resting on the laurels of a previous success and a well-known name. These companies really haven't thought enough about what problem they're actually solving, and are almost arrogant about what the market really needs. "Of course the market will want this, because I'm awesome" syndrome.
In short, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater... there are plenty of companies that need that kind of capital that are doing great things. And if I had to guess, I'd bet that Scribd was one of them.